On May 7th, Writers’ Centre Norwich hosted Martin Amis at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. Amis was in conversation with the Observer’s Robert McCrum, Chair of Writers’ Centre Norwich, and long time friend of Amis. On stage their natural rapport was evident.

The event was sold out, which is unsurprising given that Amis is considered one of the leading living novelists in the UK, and also carries with him the weight of his literary heritage (as expounded in Experience, his Memoir that also sets out his relationship to his father Kingsley Amis). McCrum got Amis started with some pertinent questions, which Amis responded to at length. His relaxed and considered way of talking conveyed a natural, witty style that certainly kept the audience happy.

The discussion saw Amis refer back through a literary career, which took off in the mid 1980’s with his novel Money: A Suicide Note, considered by many to have summed up the zeitgeist of the time. That novel was part of a trilogy comprising London Fields, The Information and Time's Arrow, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has published many novels, his most recent publication being a collection of essays and short stories The Second Plane (2008).

In the first half of the event, Amis’ musings covered the literary world, the rise and fall of the superstar author, and the trials of aging, with Amis proving well able to laugh at himself as well as the world around him.

Amis generally took the long view, for example, explaining the adulation of writers as a fairly recent phenomena that exploded into culture in the 70’s when the fame vehicle had nowhere else to go. He thinks this phase is now on its way out, and that literature will return to being a niche activity; a change heralded by the general decline in our interest in poetry. In what he believes is a deep cultural shift relating to our whole way of living, Amis pointed out how people generally no longer have any time to stop or reflect for long – the modern world simply has no time for poetry. Describing novelists as more aligned to the chug chug chug of life, he says that they have so far fared better, but feels the literary novelists days of fame are numbered.

In the second half of the evening, McCrum invited Amis to read from his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, which had only been sent off to his publisher the previous day. As Amis took to the podium, he seemed quite happy reading the opening pages in the novel's first public outing. The writing showed a return to comic form, as the narrator mused on the indignities of facing the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis explained afterward, that love became divorced from sex.

He said he started to write the novel autobiographically, (something that has been interesting the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction, and impossible to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form. This explains why the novel will be released a few months later than planned, in February 2010. From the audience's delighted reaction to the reading however, it seems it will be worth the wait.

Words > Katy Carr
Photos > Marin Figura